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November 2016

DAVIDE MONALDI & TINDAR

ProjectB
is pleased to present the double solo show by Davide Monaldi and Tindar, two
young Italian artists, both finalists in the 17th edition of Premio Cairo.

Drawing
is the shared feature of the work of these two artists: drawing as a starting
point from which both take their cue to then transform it, by subtraction or
addition, into works evolving towards completely new and unexpected forms.

Monaldi
begins his career by drawing complex images that require the use of color for
their construction. He then begins to shape the first works in clay, and to
gradually implement a kind of subtraction that leads to the creation, since 2010,
of small, poetic sculptures in ceramic, with a minimal aesthetic, that narrate
intimate microstories connected with everyday life, granting nobility to the
process of manual production.

Tindar begins with his Radici (Roots), the visual representation of
what cannot be seen, that he draws on the pages of antique texts personally researched, which form
the basis of our civilization and culture. He then goes on with the Tracce
(Traces): fingerprints, imprinted with ink
on paper and repeated a thousand times in an almost sculptural gesture. The Trace Project is the evolution of this first series, a project
where art is at the service of man to bring direct help to the migrants of
Calais, a tragically timely case.

Each
of the two artists has been assigned one of the two rooms of the gallery in Milan,
with the aim of triggering a natural dialogue between their works, a
contrapuntal narrative that becomes an itinerary of multiple echoes and
reverberations, rather than contaminations and contrasts.

DAVIDE MONALDI

Hula hoops that suddenly become heavy,
rugby balls that do not bounce but nevertheless fly upwards to become totems.
Works where Monadi offers his vision of the world from an alternative vantage
point, such as art should always reveal.
Simple objects, equal to the originals
in terms of shape and size, raised to the status of works through a production
in which the process of craftsmanship of clay becomes the conceptual foundation
for the work itself.

The sculptural output of Davide Monaldi,
shaped in ceramic or raw terracotta, has been called a “casting of the world”
by Saverio Verini: colored
elastics or wallpaper that detaches from the wall become objects worthy of
aesthetic contemplation and mingle with masks and figures that link back to the
theme of the self-portrait.

In the transfiguration of these
object-subjects there are no traces of grandeur, but instead a serious, almost
bitter aftertaste that takes a clear distance from the apparent irony of
certain works, from the rhetoric of recycling or any aesthetizing pretense.

A poetic gaze that evokes childhood,
melancholy but proud of the manual skill that Monaldi, as a self-taught ceramist,
pours into his works, transferring the technique into the contemporary sphere
and taking part in that movement of recovery of a certain artistic gesture
recently championed by many young artists.

TINDAR

The Traces, fingerprints impressions, are a
true allegory of the Self. A series
developed around the uniqueness of our fingerprints, imprinted with ink on
paper and repeated in an almost sculptural gesture, a thousand times per
painting to recreate the specific form of each one. The micro of our simple
fingerprint that forms the macro of an ephemeral form, allegory of our Self,
which repeating infinitely demonstrates its lack of consistency.

Starting from these first works the
artist has given rise to a new meaning for the series, The Trace Project, a
project where art is at the service of man to bring direct help to the migrants
of Calais, a tragically timely case.

Tindar, since November, has personally
gone repeatedly to the refugee camps to gather 6000 fingerprints made by the
refugees themselves, of any race, creed or religion.
A gesture of awareness where for the
first time the migrants are asked to make a contribution, instead of being
asked for fingerprints as a means of identification.

During the last exhibition by Tindar at the gallery, fingerprints were gathered
from those willing to donate them as a way of participating in the project,
through the symbolic gesture of “getting their hands dirty” with ink. These
prints, together with those gathered by the artist in the refugee camp at Calais,
now form a new cycle of works that will be shown at the gallery and in a
traveling exhibition all over Europe, to then be auctioned in Paris to benefit
the Trace Project, recently reviewed in a long article by Bernard-Henri Levy in Corriere della Sera. This
project, created by Pierre Farge, has its aim in attracting the public interest
in the current immigration issue, moreover it wants to foster an adequate law
system that could assure migrants of better life conditions.